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Friday, December 23, 2016

That One Christmas

I used to hate summer more than any
other time of year. Thighs scraping together, sweat pooling about my
body like the worst superpower ever. One year I even wore a car air
freshener almost ironically. But winter gets worse every year. I have
a beard because it’s easier than not having one. I don’t think
about it too much but every winter the kids stare, and then ask me if
I’m going to be Santa. It’s not bad, with the little kids, but
children grow up faster with every year. They know the truth sooner
and sooner, and the question becomes barbed. Because of course
there is no other job for you when you’re fat.

Only
that’s not true at all. Santa
is fat and jolly, but Santa isn’t obese. You
see fat people as Santa all the time, but never anyone like me.

“Are
you a Santa?” is asked from
behind me. I turn, pause:
the
kid is
eleven. I am
too pissed off to register anything else – or even wonder how I
know he’s eleven in the way people know hair colour and skin tones
– and I give him my best glare.

“No. I’m not
going to be Santa this year; you don’t get to be a Santa when
you’re too fat to get into his grotto,” I snarl. “Or did you
want to make a joke about how I ate Santa and Ms. Claus, or had too
many Christmas snacks? I’ve heard it. Whatever joke you want to
make. I’ve heard it all before.”

The
kid steps
back, eyes wide. “But I was
doing an asking, which isn’t a joke at all most of the time you
know,” he says.

“What?”

He pauses a moment.
“Oh! I guess a knock-knock joke is a question that is a joke, but I
didn’t say all the time because I’m clever like a Jay!”

I manage to say
what again.

“Is that a joke
too? I sometimes miss human jokes even if Charlie says single words
can be jokes but she means my name when she says that. I’m Jay,”
and he says it as if we’ve been friends forever.

The kid stiffens.
His grin vanishes and he stares up at me with an expression I’ve
never seen before and hope to God I never see again.

“I – I – I
didn’t mean anything,” I manage to get out. “I meant that you
weren’t alone?”

“Oh!” And he
grins. The word doesn’t do anything justice. The grin is huge and
welcoming and I’d swear blind that my knees ache less just because
the grin is so open and honest, but I can’t forget the look before
it and the terrifying certainty he was closer to killing me than even
he knew. The kid is eleven: that doesn’t factor into it at all.

“My name’s
Rob,” I say. “Sorry. I just – this is a bad time of year for
me.”

Jay nods. “Lots
of people say that, even if it’s Christmas but people say that
about every holiday and sometimes I wonder why humans have them
unless they’re weapons to wound other people with?”

“Sometimes they
are,” I say, managing to not make it a question. I thought
something was loose inside the kid’s head, but now I’m wondering
if it’s my head or if he’s real at all. I let out a breath. “I’m
not a Santa, no. My beard isn’t white yet.”

Jay nods. “I
don’t even have a beard, so I can’t be one at all! And I’m not
allowed to be an elf.”

“Uh. Why not?”
I ask because I can’t help but wonder what his answer will be.

“Because the kind
of gifts I make aren’t nice like the ones elves make, even elves
that aren’t nice at all.” He pouts. “And I try really hard at
making them because I’m jaysome you know.” He brightens a moment
later. “I bet I could help make your beard white for you! Charlie
says I give her lots of grey hairs, so giving white ones shouldn’t
be hard at all.”

“That’s not –.”
I stare down at him. I’m certain he can see me, but I can’t shake
the feeling he’s not seeing what other people see. “I’m fat,
Jay. I’m so fat that I once tried to audition to be an extra in a
movie – the fat background guy in a scene – and was told I’d
need to lose weight to get the part.”

It’s a joke but
also a true thing that happened. Jay doesn’t laugh. The kid just
scratches his head. “I’ve lost lots of things, but not important
ones and I bet you’d want to be a Santa, right?”

No one has ever put
it like that, and there is something behind the words. “I would,”
I whisper, which I’ve never told to anyone before. Not even to
myself.

“Perfect! I have
some friends you can be a Santa for,” he says, and grabs my right
hand.

There are stories
you don’t tell anyone about, because you don’t believe they
happened even if you were there. I don’t have many of those, but
seconds later I know this is going to surpass all of them as a
Bigfoot stares down at me. It is at least eight feet fall and smells
even worse than it looks. There is a fire in a fire pit, a circle of
– some of them look like people. Others don’t look like anything
I know of at all. Some hurt my head just to see, as if my brain
simply can’t process whatever is in front of me. One of them claims
to be named Ms. Apple and is an old lady only she’d not that at
all.

“Jay.” The
voice beside me is human, and resigned. I turn and look at someone so
ordinary it calms me, his eyes full of wry understanding.

“Honcho! I found
a Santa,” Jay says proudly.

I notice every
thing else has moved to give the boy space; I’m certain he hasn’t
noticed that at all.

“Of course you
did.” The man called Honcho looks me over without a hint of
judgement, and does – I think he gestures, or whistles. Calls. I
know that much. He calls something, and I am wearing a perfectly
fitting and comfortable Santa Claus costume a moment later.

“Honcho! He
doesn’t have a sack of presents,” Jay says. “I bet I could get
lots of them and –.”

“Meeting Santa is
a gift, Jay. Being one also gift enough,” Honcho says. “You don’t
need to give gifts when you are one: people forget that too often.”

“Oooooh,” Jay
says. “I’m a gift all the time then!”

A woman beside me
snorts. She looks human, though I don’t think that means anything
here.

“Charlie. You
don’t have to be mean,” Jay says.

“I snorted.”

“You did it in a
very meany way though!”

I start laughing I
can’t help it. The kid is somehow impossible and grounding all at
once, and the man called Honcho is – I think he’s keeping me
whole, sane, here, though I’m not sure why I feel this.

There is no grotto,
but Santa is the grotto. I understand that and some of the things
here were once human, or where human forms, or were never human at
all. But they’re in a country where you almost can’t escape
holidays. There is a yearning in them, and there is one in me as
well.

I sit, and my voice
sounds deeper than normal when I ask who wants to talk to Santa.

Some do. Some do
not. I don’t remember most of it, which is for the best. Some of
them don’t have voices. But at the end of it all I feel content and
Jay offers up a huge that impossibly goes all around me and hugs me
tightly. I think tentacles are involved, try not to think about that
and am back home moments later.

My beard is white.
I think it’s going to stay that way. It’s only the next morning
when I realize my knees and back don’t ache at all that I realize I
was given a gift as well. I just hope it’s not the kind that is
secretly a burden. Not that I think Jay would do that, but I am not
sure he’d understand it at all. I put clothing on, head outside.
It’s snowing, and some kids ask if I’m Santa. Even the older ones
don’t have as much bite to the question as they did before.

Maybe it’s the
beard. Maybe it’s last night. I just smile and tell them that they
should try being Santa as well, and that seems to leave them content.
And I am content as well, which is gift enough for an evening I am
already halfway to forgetting.

A collection of miscellany

Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily than condoms.

- Dr. Joycelyn Elders

In fantasy, impossible things exist. In science fiction, impossible things exist and can be understood by humans. In supernatural horror, impossible things exist and cannot live in peace with humans.

- Will Shetterly

We are living in a time when you can believe anything, as long as you do not claim it to be true.

- Ravi Zacharia

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

- Richard Dawkins

In the time of harmony the golden age is not in the past, it is in the future

- Paul Signac

"No" is the wildest word in the English language.

- Emily Dickinson

The middle ground between genuinely true and outright faking is unconscious delusion.

- Dean Radin

“You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it’s hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it’s better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can’t write anybody’s book but your own.”